‘You can’t trust anybody’: Ontario elderly homeowners fight back against ‘rotten’ renovation contracts

Thorold, Ont., retirees say $100,000 of ‘lodgements’ remain on their property years after contractors failed to replace their bathtub. Jon Woodward explains.

Elderly homeowners who were approached by door-to-door salesmen years ago fear they’re still on the hook for shoddy renovations they may not have even asked for, thanks to a company connected to a fugitive with a warrant out for his arrest and a financial instrument thought to have been eliminated in Ontario.

Thorold, Ont., retirees Cathern and Stephen Johnson say “lodgements” worth at least $100,000 remain on their property years after they said contractors failed to replace their bathtub and left new kitchen flooring with a crack so large the old linoleum can be seen under it.

“I wouldn’t even give him a nickel for that stuff,” Stephen Johnson, a 67-year-old former truck driver, told CTV News in an interview.

“It makes us feel rotten. Pure rotten. Like you can’t trust anybody,” said Cathern Johnson, 72.

The Johnsons are among those who intend to challenge the lodgements, which are financial instruments, like a lien, that can be registered against a property at Ontario’s land titles office as collateral for some work done on the home, while Ontario’s opposition NDP is pledging to pass a law to wipe them out.

A lodgement’s immediate effect is that the Johnsons can’t sell their home unless they pay that lodgement off or hire a lawyer to ask a judge to throw the lodgement out.

Lawyer Bethanie Pascutto said she’s been approached by dozens of elderly homeowners in this situation.

Some have multiple lodgements registered to their title, often for about $41,000 each, as the salesmen returned again and again.

The Johnsons showed off a contract that charted a total of $63,740 for “kitchen improvement supply and install of a smart nest thermostat.”

An internet search on Tuesday showed that a Nest Thermostat could be purchased for under $400.

Pascutto said she has had some of the lodgements tossed out in court, but given the scale of the number of lodgements out there, she’s calling for Ontario’s government to implement a wider solution.

“We don’t know the total number of people who have been impacted, but we expect it’s in the hundreds, if not thousands,” Pascutto said.

The lawyer filed documents in Ontario Superior Court that say the financing company for these lodgements, Alternative Financial Group, can be traced to a man named Anas Ayyoub.

Ayyoub has posted videos to social media of himself living a high life, surrounded by expensive cars. The OPP charged him and others with fraud for another door-to-door scheme in 2024, and put out a Canada-wide warrant for his arrest.

Ayyoub’s lawyer told CTV News on Tuesday he had no comment. The OPP confirmed on Tuesday that Ayyoub is still on the run.

In the previous scheme, Ayyoub was among those accused of using a similar financial instrument, a notice of security interest or NOSI, to enforce the debts.

After a review, the Ontario government decided to wipe all NOSIs from the books retroactively, which made those debts unenforceable.

That same law banned new lodgements. But it left existing lodgements intact. And Pascutto said there was a rush to register them before the rules took effect.

“All the lodgements that we’ve seen that were registered by this company were registered just before the deadline hit,” Pascutto said.

The NDP’s critic, Tom Rakocevic, said those older lodgements need to be wiped clean as well.

“Thousands of these lodgements are still out there. We in the NDP are going to be tabling a bill very soon to delete and expire all lodgements from the land registry here in Ontario,” he said.